Bye Felicia

One of the few benefits of dating as a hobby is developing a superior ability to judge a character. Well, that’s what you’d think anyway.

In some instances it’s made easy: If my S/O asks my cup size over a candlelit dinner, while drooling at my conservatively buttoned-up shirt, I’m able to gather that the only thing he’s interested in is whether it’s his place or mine. Conversely, if he admits he’s never met a girl with such amazing taste in all his Tinder-escapades, I can rest-assured that there will be a second date.

But what happens when your judgement is clouded by actually investing your time into someone?

Thankfully, that’s a rarity for me; but on that rare occasion, I seem to momentarily forget everything I’ve learned from three years of gathering information on the opposite sex.

Swept up in the excitement of meeting someone whose character traits don’t make you want to be anywhere else but with them, it’s easy to let yourself fall into a state of denial. Your fleetingly distracted mind starts to selectively forget everything you told yourself you wouldn’t stand for.

He rarely contacts you, but it’s okay because he says he’s just not into texting. He cancels plans at the last minute, but that’s okay too because he has good reasons. He says you’re not really a topic of conversation with his friends, but that’s also fine, he’s got Brexit and other world issues to debate.

And then you realise, you’re being used for the sake of convenience. Fortunately though, I’m not one to keep quiet in the hope that my instincts are wrong when I finally realise I’ve turned into that girl.

Striking a balance in feelings is not an easy task to master; and when the emotional investment is held more heavily by one party, you can see how men and women alike settle in unhappy relationships to avoid the awkward inevitably of the chat.

I’ve been in both parties many times before, but on this occasion I was the wounded party. Perhaps it’s karma for all those broken hearts I’ve left littered around Essex and London, or perhaps this is simply another case of mismatched agendas – my sensibility tells me it’s the latter.

A good friend of mine lives by the ruling of her “gut-feelings” – if things just don’t feel quite right, the chances are it’s more than an upset stomach.

So, I could cry into a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food and pick apart every inch of myself in search of what went wrong; what I did wrong, or I could write a blog about it like the Taylor Swift of WordPress. Well, it’s quite blatant which of those avenues I chose (and I can assure you these ramblings have proved to be quite cathartic).

I’m not sure whether I wrote this for him, myself or for you, and what to say from here.

As awfully cliché as it sounds, your instinct isn’t often wrong. There may not be an immediate light at the end of the tunnel, but I can seek solace in the knowledge that my doubts were grounded and that I was fortunate to escape with nothing more than a dented ego.